When the Devil Knocks Twice
by luxmondy
Summary: When the TARDIS malfunctions, Amy and Eleven are stranded in Elizabethan London. Something very odd indeed is afoot: time is out of joint, rumours fly about the Devil marching through the city streets and Amy just tried to kiss him. Post-Flesh
1. Chapter 1

_This is my first fiction for Doctor Who, but seeing Eleven/Amy, how can one resist? How can one not want more? And more, and..._

_I think it was Terry Pratchett who said that there was no 'science' in the 'science fiction' of Doctor Who. I tend to agree. I have here attempted to combine some science (the most outrageous bits are true) with another passion of mine: Christopher Marlowe. His play Dr Faustus is wonderful. _

_Unfortunately - for me - I own neither Doctor Who, Matt Smith, science or Dr Faustus. I don't own marlowe either, which is fortunate - for me - because he has been dead for a while and would smell bad._

_Here goes:_

* * *

_Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd_

_In one self place; but where we are is hell,_

_And where hell is, there must we ever be._

~ Mephistopheles, _Dr Faustus_ (Christopher Marlowe)

...

He was twenty nine years old and he was dying.

Every heartbeat fell from his chest like a withered leaf in an autumn-chilled wind.

So he lingered in the doorway, watching, unseeing, an empty stage of rotting wood and the falling flecks of dust whilst the rain fell around him.

The noises of the city that tolled out the little lives of men came feebly through the gathering dusk. Hammering, screeching, weeping, an incessant torrent of sound surging from the wordless, the senseless horde. A rampant chaos, this, his reality, where voices always came as though from behind a thick curtain, spoken to someone else.

Rivulets of water parted his hair and fell unto his lower arm where the carved words writhed like living, pulsating cobweb spun in scarlet thread.

Familiarity had taught him to read in the familiar cant another message:

The meaning of life is glorified. The meaning of life is simple. It stops.

All places were alike now. Every earth was fit for burial. Even the crowded theatre roared his loneliness back at him.

He had given them a show. Now the demons were coming for him from the shadows.

He thought of all the gods of purification who promised to rid the world of its evils. Those supreme idols of human folly had never been in short supply upon mankind's many shrines. _Perhaps we feel singularly in need of them._

Somewhere in Cheapside a bell tolled the hour out.

He had no time anymore.

* * *

She had kissed him.

Over the years, whilst she waited, Time had spun her fairytale into the shape of a man; he had returned and been real, and to a girl who had lived the principal part of her life within the wondrous regions of her own mind this intrusion of the corporeal was, well, overwhelming.

She had become accustomed to move with her imaginary friend through the mundane like a midnight shadow through the pale glare of the noonday sun.

The everyday had been out of step with her imagination. Yet, the perils of 'growing up' soon enough demanded a partitioning of the two in that spur towards monotony she never could stop loathing; in order to survive she banished the fairytale to the dusty recesses of her soul, soon boarded up and neglected out of an uncertain sense of shame and sadness.

She had become her own spirit's jailer.

And then he returned.

Now she was travelling with her Raggedy Doctor, travelling between the sprinkled dots of distant stars through the blackness. It was the blackness of her youth's fairytales, the uncharted lands of enchantments and they chanted to her in those moments, when silence fell and the world fell away.

_Hush now_, sang deep space in its mysterious humming voice, _hush. You are now a pilgrim in the untrodden forest, in this vast and wild garden of starflowers and shadowstreams._

Then he would offer his hand, and with his smile saying _let us go then you and I _they would go together into the cold and the quiet.

Well, usually.

Now, she had kissed him and another kind of hush had descended. Chaos had been the principle of her life and she had striven for control for such a long time so the decision to become the instigator of a little more misrule had felt sensible; to produce a little more mess had not seemed injurious at the time. That was simple enough. The complications came with what followed.

In her imagination the vague suspicion had lingered that he would not respond. She had spent too long nursing the hurt he had left in her as she waited; the fear that, in a garden on a distant winter's night, it had been her inadequacy that made him leave her was a fear not easily dispelled.

But now she had kissed him and for a brief, timeless moment he had kissed her back. That turn of events led to a feeling she supposed was rather akin to vertigo.

Afterwards, the Doctor's few moments of vehement denial had given way to a persistent and studious silence that made her suspect that he was in even bigger turmoil than she was.

That was why it made sense to assume that the strange, strained silence somehow emanated from him, had been an extension of the turned back and the averted gaze.

Now she was realising that it was something more.

'Hmm.'

'Yes.'

'Hmm...'

'Oh yes. _And_ it rains.'

They stood side by side, looking through the doors of the Tardis into the dismal, inhospitable darkness. Tiny, icy specks of water struck Amy's face.

'Well, out we go then.'

'What? No! Why? You said you didn't mean to come here!'

'That was before. I changed my mind. Elizabethan London. All kinds of excitement' A smile, surely forced, appeared on his face.

She narrowed her eyes. She wanted him to hear the tangy artificiality of his tone resonate dully in the silence.

'Come now, Pond. The disagreeableness is all in the mind. Even camping can be fun if you intend it to be so. So I've heard. I think.'

'You don't even believe that yourself. You just say so because we're stuck, and you don't know why, and you want to pretend it was all your idea anyway.'

He made no reply to that.

* * *

Even now He walks through London town, never seen and ever felt, and where He passes the children sing:

_As I was going up the stair  
I met a man who wasn't there  
I met that man again today  
I wish, I wish, he'd go away_

But He never does. He never will.

* * *

It was raining and the spray fell like the flecks of deep space's icy darkness against her face.

The Doctor, smiling with a childish glee, spun where he stood and water laid its barely visible banners across his face.

'Just imagine: up there is space, spilling outward for aeons and aeons and untold aeons, and the lights come blinking at you from millions and billions of years ago. Beside that cosmic time-machine, the Tardis really is just a blue box.'

She followed his eyes to the heavens where grey-streaked clouds had devoured all the stars.

'You know, Amy, it is true. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.'

Water ran inside the hem of her yellow raincoat, along the crook of her neck and made an icy stream down her back. Mud swelled like a primordial monster out of the darkness to close unseen slimy jaws around her feet.

She wondered how a man whose centuries of life lay spread amongst the stars behind the celestial curtains could still find novelty and pleasure in the sight from such a stunted vintage point.

Maybe she was getting old.

'Where are we?'

'Blackheath,' answered the Doctor.

The pitch-black of a night devoid of the incessant blush of electricity pressed against her eyes like a blanket of wool, muffling and strangling. She could turn her head but to no avail for everywhere looked the same. 'How do you know?'

The Doctor pointed to the ground before her feet, and Amy looked to see a flat piece of wood partially submerged by mud and water. It was a sign knocked off its post. In the Tardis' dim light she saw the name of the place scrawled across in uneven letters.

'And what is that?'

The Doctor came up beside her. 'An open place, near Cheapside, near the outskirts. Fairly fortunate place to get stranded in fact, considering no part of overpopulated London would otherwise let the Tardis stand unnoticed. They buried their dead here during the plagues in the fourteen-hundreds. Still a bit superstitious about the place, little wonder. Even in a century's time will the children sing their _Ring-a-ring of roses _about it.'

'Nursery rhymes are the psalms of evil things…'

And in that region of her mind awakened to the terrors of the night by stone angels weeping their crocodile tears she felt why this place was where they would be sung.

Through the dimness, at the edge of the heath, the town came crowding in like a massing throng of ghost-houses, only ever half-visible in the night's rain-strewn gloom.

Then an unforeseen movement shifted the shadows so swiftly the Doctor never cried out before the fingers knotted with grime and rheumatism clutched at his face.

Amy started forward, hardly aided by the combination of her surprise and haste with the thick sludge that had shut like fetters around her feet. She staggered, but in the sparse yellowed glow spilling from the Tardis as from a wormhole, the face of a woman was given its rough-hewn contours. She was clad in beggars' rags and her features, too, bore witness to few easy years amidst many of hardship. She was not tall and her vicelike grip compelled the Doctor to stand arched forward like a hunchback.

Her fingers dug into his cheeks like the talons of furies.

Somewhere behind the sheets of rain, a single bell tolled, muffled, like a mere revenant of sound.

But even more inhuman, rasping and guttural, was the voice of the woman.

'The devil walks in Fleet street,' she said. 'Many have seen him. He has come for the slaughter-kid.'

Amy stared in incomprehension from the woman to the Doctor, whose shocked face was still in the process of reassembling itself into some kind of mundane expression.

'The devil?'

Then he staggered as the woman released him with a shove and spun around, reaching for Amy, who scuttled backward until her back knocked against the Tardis. Few strands of dishevelled hair lay plastered across the woman's scalp. One of her eyes was milkywhite. Amy became aware that she was chanting.

'…thirteen-seven, thirteen-seven, thirteen-seven…'

'No,' said the Doctor. He sounded inquisitive but also nonplussed. Having straightened his bowtie, he held up his arm and pushing back a drenched sleeve glanced at his wristwatch. 'No, it is October fifteen-ninety-two…'

Something prickled at Amy's memory.

'…thirteen-seven,' the woman rasped, but then went utterly, eerily still, gazing unblinkingly at Amy. 'Ssshhh...' she hissed, '_he is outside time_. Tick, tock, tick, tock, toe… Sshh…What will you do, girl, when the alien who is not of time leaves you to drown in time's ruddy stream?'

In the silence of space, the raindrops fell. The air was thick and did not want to go into Amy's lungs. Somewhere in the murkiness at the corner of her eye, the Doctor stood immobile.

'Alien - What?' The air was still reluctant to come and Amy found her voice low and hoarse. 'What do you mean?'

'Thirteen-seven,' came the reply. 'Thirteen-seven…' Suddenly she broke off, and as she lurched up the nearest narrow alleyway her arms flailed madly around her body as if to clear her way from spectres visible only to her.

Amy clung to the side of the Tardis as she raised her face and looked to the Doctor. 'Was that revelatory-weird or just crazy-weird?'

The doctor glanced at her but a shutter had come down behind his eyes and she could not read his face.

'Right,' he said, turning as he spoke, 'I need to talk some more with…'

His voice withered away.

The darkness had become material. Both of them saw the shadowy figure seeming to slither from the walls ahead, saw the woman falter and finally stop as the hooded stranger bent toward her.

'What the…?' the Doctor muttered. His voice rose to a cry as he leapt forward. 'No, no, NO!'

But they were too far away and as the shadow seemed to congeal into the darkness of the night once more, the woman wilted like no living body ever could, plummeting into the alleys' watery filth and sending a scattered spray heavenward.

The rain once again felt chill, the darkness imposing, but there was also a curious sense of artifice about it all, as though thin walls had been placed around her, him, this place, and sealed them off from the rest of space and time in a little theatre of their own.

Shadows clustered in, dead, empty and inert.

They were too late and the darkness was as lifeless as the body, facing the pelting rain from the uneven cobbles. The Doctor crouched beside it, looking strangely stiff.

'That wasn't there before,' Amy exclaimed.

'No,' the doctor mused, 'no, it wasn't.'

A blemish, a blackened mark, roughly circular in shape, ran across the mouth, cheeks and the eye-sockets. The eyes themselves had been burnt away. Cavity facing cavity.

The Doctor pointed his screwdriver vainly at the area where once a face had been. Only somewhere nearby did a bell utter its shrill cry. The Doctor started to his feet.

'We need to go.'

'Go – where?'

'Back to the Tardis would be good. Come on, Pond, go! Or even better, run!' He grabbed her hand and Amy was dragged at a frenzied pace back the way they came. For a moment she felt glad for the sense of unreality that still enveloped her; otherwise she suspected that the death, corpse and sudden running might have made her sick.

'Why are we running?'

'Because that bell you heard, that was the curfew bell. And I don't want your head stuck on London Bridge for breaking curfew on our first night in Elizabethan England. Bad form.' He thrust her inside the Tardis and slammed the door after them.

Amy found his face a hand's breadth from her own as they simultaneously leant an ear against the doors.

'If you,' she said, 'are bothered by the curfew, wouldn't it be an idea to turn off the lights?'

Without taking his eyes off her face, he raised his right arm, at full stretch, clutching the screwdriver; a few eclectic toots later and the faint blueish glow emitted from the little device was the only thing illuminating his face.

He fought the monsters but fled from people. If she was therapeutically inclined that could have provided ample fodder for hours of musing. As it was, she filed it momentarily in that overcrowded part of her mind pertaining to the unexplained eccentricities of the Doctor.

'It was not a year.'

'What do you mean?' He too lapsed into a whisper.

'Thirteen-seven. At least, I don't think anybody could be that confused about which year they live in. Elizabethans, you know, people in this now, they are quite the witch-believing, demon-summoning kind. Thirteen and seven are the numbers of necromancy. The devil's numbers.'

'Devil's numbers… Quite so. Naturally. Thirteen has been awkward since your ancient Babylonians made a year of twelve equal sized months and were left with some dregs of time-stuff that had nowhere to go. Time outside time, if you so wish. You still think of time as multiples of twelve. Seven. Seven colours of rainbow, seven years of famine, seven deadly sins.' He paused. 'Do you dally in Early Modern earth history, Pond?'

Some part of her felt a pang of annoyance at the teasing glint in his eyes, the droll incredulity in his voice. 'I can read, you know,' she snapped. 'I found some books about belief in angels and demons in your library.'

'You dally in human superstition?'

'No,' she replied brusquely, 'but I don't usually dally with stoney demon-angel thugs that nearly kill me, either. I just needed to get them out of my head.'

'By reading about them?'

'It seemed the best way of going about not being afraid of them, yes.'

Even the Tardis' never-ceasing, living, soothing hum had faded into lightless stillness. Only her heart beat out the time. Her heart and his; even with the universe in disarray, his chest would rise and fall, she thought, steadily.

She was rather surprised when he placed a hand on her hair, cradled her head and leant toward her, and half-whispered, 'Sometimes I quite like you, Pond.'

And then the sound came from without, the slow, unnatural sound of something tearing apart. She thought it was a voice and yet it was not a sound any human should ever make. It ruptured so suddenly and so very close that Amy would have cried out but for the fingers the Doctor held at her lips, his eyes bidding _quiet_ though he said nothing.

_The devil walks down Fleet Street_, sing-sang the echo in her mind. She looked back into the Doctor's eyes, glistening bluish-black in the light of the screwdriver, when the noise came again.

It was a sound… of tearing. Into her mind came images of skin, fabric, sheets of metals torn apart because she had to think of something comprehensible and known.

'What is happening?' she whispered, but so quietly her lips moved mutely against his fingers.

The sound ceased and silence seemed to plummet unto them from the surrounding darkness. There was something terrible in standing listening to an unknown horror you could neither see nor visualise.

'That is the essential mystery,' he whispered.

He had drawn breath to go on when a thump sounded right by his face from the other side of the door. A single beat on the door and yet two knocks reverberated around the Tardis.

_Knock_

_Knock_

'Who's there?' the Doctor whispered with wonder.

But merely the silence returned in reply. It stretched out with that ethereal, timeless immensity it only possessed when the world of normality was rendered invalid. At the ragged edges of Amy's mind the terror instilled by blindness and the memory of faces of stone hovered, threatening and chill. She felt little and silly in her fear.

'We did not run and hide because of a human curfew, did we?'

'No,' he just said.

'Do you know what we ran and hid from, then?'

It was not the Doctor's voice that answered. It was a hoarse, incorporeal stream of sounds, like a hidden wind shuddering through naked tree tops. But there were words in it; jeering, sing-song words. Whether they were English words or translated by the Doctor's clever machine, she did not know.

The voices seemed to rise out of the fabric of the night itself, woven in and out of the breeze, the rushing of the rain.

_Who be the man who hides in a box_

_What is his name, you say?_

_Will he come out when the devil knocks,_

_Or wait for the wolves to bay? _

The light in the Doctor's eyes seemed to shrivel inward.

To be well-read in demonology seemed futile now; she was still scared. Amy felt herself plunged into a fairytale not of her time whose evils belonged to an inarticulate, unimaginable past.

* * *

_Chapter one - an epic lot to go... Please let me know what you think. Good, bad, abysmal, I just want to hear it. :-)_


	2. Chapter 2

Thank you so much to all who reviewed! I apologise for the delay in updating.

* * *

FAUSTUS: What means this show? Speak, Mephistopheles.

MEPHIST.: Nothing, Faustus, but to delight thy mind

And see what magic can perform.

FAUSTUS: But may I raise such spirits as I please?

~ _Dr Faustus_, Christopher Marlowe

* * *

The deeper into the woods she went, the more gnarled the trees became, the blacker their wrinkled skin, the more profound the shadows and the harder the path to follow.

The Doctor's being was a wilderness no living thing should venture into alone.

As the timber and white chalk of the theatre's walls rose before her from the darkness like some primordial deity's temple, the Girl who Waited felt like the girl in the fairytales swallowed up by a nameless and never-ending forest. There was an inscrutable mystery waiting in the tangled depths. She felt that she was trying to discover something that thought could not think.

She looked down on the piece of parchment in her hand. The rain had caused the black ink to run like diluted blood burst from the arteries of letters and drawn figures; it was a woodcut showing a man standing in a circle drawn on the floor, an open book in one hand, a long slender staff in the other. In the opposite corner, facing him, the blurred form of some nonhuman creature sat hunched. Its contours were indistinct but they horns, tale and cloven feet were nonetheless unmistakable. At the top of the leaf large letters proclaimed the performance of _The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus _at 'the Rose' theatre by the Admirals Men.

It had come gyrating on an unseen wind when the Doctor had pulled open the door to an abandoned Blackheath, striking the arm in which he held the screwdriver aloft. The darkness, empty of movement and voice, had seemed to mock them. Skipping into the Tardis again, he had pushed the wet sheet into Amy's hand, striding to the central console where buttons, levers and pulleys remained unsympathetic to his fervent efforts at cajoling a response.

In a flustered, stuttering way Amy had remarked that something had been singing a weird song about him; what did he make of that?

He had pointed to a narrow tube about the length of his palm that pulsed with a subtle gold-violet glow.

There, he had said. Somehow, time was churning itself into massive block and the Tardis was stuck in it like a boat in waterweeds. The little tube was gathering energy to convert it into a time impulse that would allow him to propel them out of this moment. But it was not strong enough yet. Not yet. They would have to stay for a little while.

Amy had said 'but' just as he had pulled the paper from her hand and run his eyes over it.

'A nice black, charred circle, is it not? Evocative. Somebody is playing at summoning devils unto a stage. Maybe that is a place to start. Dress up, Amy Pond, we're going to the playhouse!'

* * *

The night was not empty anymore; it was teeming with a kind of half-life that made the shadows something moving and tangible. Shapes that merely hinted at humanity slithered in, out, along alleys and narrow pathways, where an arid stench seemed to be more palpably real than the clustering buildings to which it clung like an incubus, like some demonic leech stealing another life.

The moon broke through the clouds and sent down a sparse spatter of light just as they passed into a wider street. A scantily clad woman reached for the Doctor; her hand was dirty and bejewelled, but she slinked back at the gleam of unfeigned pity in his eyes. Or maybe she saw Amy at his side.

Amy felt only the vague sense of revulsion that belonged to the surreal and hideous world of nightmare. Even when she stumbled and found that the obstruction at her feet was the lifeless form of a dead horse, lying as it had fallen, still shackled to its cart, she merely stared until the Doctor took her hand and resolutely pulled her away.

Through the small windows of the theatre came the smell of the streets, acrid and pungent, chequered with the sweet rot wafting in from the nearby river.

Underneath it lingered the scent of something else. Fragile and indistinct, he could not pin it down, and murmured, 'like catching dew on your tongue'.

Her eyes shone despite the darkness, and a soft frown creased her brow.

'You're strange.'

'How appropriate. This is a strange place. A strange place for a strange going-on. Question is…'

The edge of the stage caught the faint moonlight spilling through the open roof, looking like a desolate shore to the black sea of shadows that made up the adjoining courtyard. It rose from the floor to the level of his hip, the wooden boards groaning in that otherworldly, deep-bellied voice only trees posses as he hoisted himself unto it.

'…why these strange going-ons in this strange place is going on at _this_ strange time. Why now? What is so particular about _this_ _now_ that time should get all caught up and my Tardis get embroiled in its whirlpool?'

'You're the Timelord. Temporal matters are your raison d'etre. You'll figure it out.' He felt no inclination to argue with that, even though he suspected that her comment was pregnant with a tint of sarcasm if not a hint of mockery. She went on, slightly breathless, he thought, as though she was unsure whether to raise her voice from a whisper. 'Look, the hocus-pocus man has left his circle lying about. First the crack in my wall, now this. Tell me, is the universe a really shabby place or do we just keep, sort of, hitting all the cosmic pot holes?'

Even in the faint moonlight it was clearly visible, a black mark seared into the wooden floorboards. Pacing around the outside of the warping line, the Doctor saw the shadows shift like shallow water around his feet but too slowly, too slowly by far, as if time were out of step with itself. He could feel the cavity left behind as he moved, like the way thick mud only lethargically will efface a footprint; against his skin he could feel the pressure exerted by the atoms, the particles, the distant galaxies, which occupied the space that his movement thrust him into. It was as if his mere presence was a paradox; he was somewhere he could not be, and even the trifling substance of his shadow used up too much space.

He rummaged through his pockets, finally pulling forth the tiny Victorian watch from the inner chest pocket in his jacket. He tapped the glass; the little round clock gave him its best pokerface, the hands quivered but remained immobile.

The Doctor thought of faerie rings, those portals, thresholds, places where realms of being were knitted together, where you should never step across the boundary; for within the circle there is no time and thus no memory, and without memory the world is lost to you and you to the world.

Rather like wormholes.

Or the event horizons of black holes.

Sometimes he wondered whether the difference between mythology and science were essential or merely a matter of degree or ostentation.

'It all sounds a bit Goldilocks,' Amelia said, and he looked at her where she sat cross-legged, her back against a wooden pillar. 'Just now, everything is just right. Not too cold, not too hot…ideal for devils to go for strolls through London. Maybe they like rain and mud.' Her gaze was cast down to the damp piece of paper in her hands whose folds she was nimbly straightening out. With a pang came the inexplicable urge to reach out and tuck the errant strand of red hair behind her ear. He sunk down beside her, swinging his legs off the edge of the stage.

'I think time has stopped,' he said.

'But we're moving. And talking. How would we do that if time didn't move?'

'I think,' he began slowly. 'I think that we are moving through time but time is not moving through…_us_. It is out of joint. More like a room than a river, if you will.'

She looked troubled. 'I don't understand…'

'Don't worry. The problem with now, or the _nows_, rather, was too much even for Aristotle. Besides, time is not a sense and nor was it designed to accord with what the human mind considers 'sensible'. Take that circle for example.'

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her glance over her shoulder. 'It has got a perimeter, but it has not got any inside.'

'But I can see it,' she protested immediately.

'No,' he corrected her. 'You can see where there is no line anymore, but the end of a line do not the bowels of a circle make.' An icy tingle at his temple, an odd fatigue in his limbs registered the sense of something daunting and forbidding that his mind refused to acknowledge. The air was pregnant with it. 'Could you not,' he snapped, grabbing hold of her wrist, 'touch it? Do you humans have eyestalks fastened to your fingertips or something? Something unknown is doing I know not what, so for now, no touching.'

Glaring back at him, Amy wrenched her arm free. 'Fine.'

He held her gaze, wondering. 'Good,' he said softly.

A vice of his was a tendency to be logical when he should be thinking. Often the universe would set up a shadow play of logic, entice him to believe in it only to eschew it; so to dare the vast unbounded void just a little, he did things that made no sense. The air burned against his palm as he reached forward, drew a breath and plunged his hand across the circle's rim.

He interrupted her inevitable objection, murmuring, 'Do as I say and not as I do…' and she quietened long enough for his hearts to sound two protracted, quavering knells, racking his body in that invisible, quiet way that made it so easy to pretend that nothing was wrong.

Because something was wrong. Something was so exceedingly not very good at all.

'So?'

He withdrew his hand but kept holding it out at arms length, wriggling his fingers. The strange prickling in every part of his skin subsided torpidly.

'You know, Pond,' he said, hoping that if he just kept speaking his nonsensical thoughts would array themselves before him in some kind of comprehensible order. 'Humans can only account for four percent of the cosmos. All the mass, the particles, those tiniest little vibrating strings, all the building-blocks of space, all the goo that power the great celestial laboratories, all the stuff of which stars are made, it is only four percent. Four. Little flecks of dust in the emptiness.' In his head it whirled, too, soft, rushing and ungraspable. He frowned. Talking was not helping. 'In there, in that little circle, lies the rest of the universe.'

In her eyes he saw his own doubt and confusion honed and lit up.

'But that doesn't make sense either.'

Any attempt to illuminate a tiny sphere of space just made even more profound the surrounding darkness. He held up an open palm. 'Universe,' he said. The other hand he curled into a fist. 'Human mind,' he said. 'Whoosh.' The fist whizzed past the palm without touching it. Amy stared at him.

The prickling in his thumbs went on even when he tried rubbing them against his jacket. 'I need a balloon,' he mumbled.

'Not the rest of the fairground?'

He turned to face her, resting on his knees and pushing up his sleeves.

'Pond, imagine you have a balloon.'

'Okaaay.'

'You put some white stickers on it. Then you blow it up. What happens?'

'The white stickers fall off?'

Every now and then he was very nearly convinced she annoyed him on purpose.

'Imagine they are sticking stickers that stay on. They get further apart. Further and further and further apart as you blow up the balloon. That is like the universe.' He flung out his arms. 'Whoom. Getting larger all the time.'

'Hum,' she scoffed. 'No wonder you keep getting lost.'

'I don't get – never mind. Now, listen, this is important. Matter attracts matter –'

'Newton. Gravity.'

'Yes, but if that were all everything should implode.' He clapped his hands together. 'But. It. Doesn't. Why? Because of anti-gravity.'

'You're making this up.'

'No I'm not. If I was, I would give it a much cooler name. Human scientists around your time figure it out, only they can't quite decide what they have figured out, so they just call it 'dark energy'. It makes things zoom outwards.' He manoeuvred her around so she was facing the circle and sat down beside her. 'If you were to plunge your hand in there – and I strongly discourage it – your atoms would fly apart.'

She shifted slightly beside him. 'Why didn't yours?'

'Well, I'm not human. My time-lord atoms consist of a tiny bit of this 'anti-gravitational' energy; that is partially why I can regenerate, in fact.'

But it was not comfortable; it was not comfortable in the least, the sweltering, pounding heat at his temple, having to concentrate so his limb did not disintegrate before his eyes. He held up his hand, but it was at the darkness glimpsed through his fingers that he looked because right then something in the shadows moved.

* * *

As per usual, reviews are greatly appreciated! :-)


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